WHY WEBINARS AREESSENTIAL FOR EVERY MARKETER

Webinars (also known as “webcasts”) are nothing new. In fact, they’ve been around in one form or another for more than 10 years.

The use cases for webinars have included training sessions, employee communications and demand generation.

What is new, however, is the advancement of webinar technology, making it more effective than ever as a demand generation vehicle to fuel marketers’ sales pipelines.

In this white paper, we’ll have a look at:

1. Why webinars have become such an effective demand generation vehicle

2. How to use webinars to create demand

3. How to develop a follow-up strategy based on webinar engagement data

INTRODUCTION

73% of marketing and sales leaders say

webinars are one of the best ways to generate

quality leads.

WHY WEBINARS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR EVERY MARKETER1

Webinars are no longer only for “top of the funnel” leads—they’re a great way to engage and rank suspects, prospects and nurtured leads at different levels in your sales funnel. In fact, webinars are a fantastic way to influence decision-makers as they make their final purchase choice.

YOUR SALES FUNNEL WILL BENEFIT

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Use Case: Lead Generation - Focus on challenges.Host an online event or webcast around a trending industry topic, keep the content neutral while indirectly promoting your brand.

Tactics: Thought Leadership Webinars, Industry-Related Events

Use Case: Solution Selling - Focus on solutions.Host an online event, webcast or series of programs to educate and help prospects during their evaluation process, showing them why you’re the best choice.

Tactics: Analyst Panels, Subject Matter Expert Sessions

Use Case: Delivering ROI - Focus on benefits.Host an online event or webcast series demonstrating the benefits of your offering and how you deliver against KPIs and help them grow their business.

Tactics: Customer Case Studies and Panel Discussions, Live Demos

Use Case: Customer Engagement - Focus on value.Host an online event or webcast series to kick off your relationship and set your customers up for success with ongoing knowledge and support.

Tactics: Best Practices Series, User Conferences, Customer Communications

Use Case: Retain, Cross-Sell & Up-Sell - Focus on success.Host an online event or webcast series introducing new products and services along with ongoing educational webcasts to continue to drive interest.

Tactics: Product Launches, Training, Customer Loyalty Programs

GROW

PURCHASE

CONSIDERATION

INTEREST

AWARENESS

WEBINARS ARE EASY TO CONFIGURE

Five to 10 years ago, the lead time on a webinar (i.e. the time you needed to begin the planning steps in advance of the broadcast) was around 60 to 90 days. Presenters required intensive training on the webinar platform while the webinar vendor required several business days to configure the webinar console.

The long lead time (per webinar) meant that marketers could only do a handful of webinars per quarter—or perhaps even just one.

Advances in technology have made webinar configuration and setup easier than ever. The best providers enable the ability to publish webinars and webcasts immediately for on-demand viewing, making it easy to create a vibrant flow of intuitive and accessible content for your audiences.

Today, presenters with a slide deck and an internet connection can set up a webcast—and begin a broadcast—in just five minutes.

Wizard-driven tools provide presenters with a step-by-step guide to webinar creation, all while preserving the branding and personalization required for each presenter.

Gone are the days of presenter training sessions—vendors have made their software so easy to use that they no longer provide user guides or manuals.

6. Go LIVE

1. Settings

2. Speakers

3. Content

4. Handouts

5. Invites

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Webinars used to be one-way communication tools in which subject matter experts would present to large audiences.

Today, audience members want to be a part of the conversation in the same way they participate on social channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Advances in webinar technology facilitate these interactions.

Now, presenters can engage with their audience in real time and adjust their presentations accordingly.

In addition, audience members can interact with one another to share thoughts, comments and ideas.

Later in this paper, we’ll cover how these interactions factor into lead qualification.

Modern webcast platforms now enable video conferencing with the click of a button, allowing multiple speakers to present in an interview or on a panel from any location in the world.

This results in an engaging, TV-quality broadcast experience that keeps your audience tuned in and improves retention.

Conversational program formats, including interviews, case studies, panels and debates, are now easier than ever to deliver globally.

WEBINARS ARE INTERACTIVE

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WEBINARS ARE MEASURABLE

As viewers (i.e. prospects) increase their interaction within your marketing webinars, they generate additional data points for lead scoring and lead qualification.

Compare the measurability of webinars to static content types.

With banner ads, you can measure impressions and clicks. For white papers, you can measure conversion rates and leads.

With webinars, you measure leads as registrations or attendees—but you also must analyze metrics such as:

• Registration/attendee conversion rates

• View time

• Live and on-demand views

• Total views

• Responses to polling questions

• Questions submitted

• Group chat comments

• Responses to surveys

• Documents downloaded

This added layer of behavioral data provides a deeper look at your audience and allows for thoughtful segmentation, lead scoring and follow up—better qualifying your leads for sales.

WEBINARS ARE INTEGRATED

Being able to integrate key data into your marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms is critical in establishing proper lead scoring and follow-up strategies, to qualify leads and move them down the funnel.

Engagement and other behavioral data can be insightful and guide your nurturing plans.

For example—you can score leads based on whether they registered or attended.

In addition, you can increase their score based on how engaged they were in the webcast.

For reference, here’s a sample scoring model:

Activity Score

Registered for Webinar 10

Attended Webinar on Demand 15

Attended Webinar Live 20

Engaged Attendees(e.g. asked questions, commented in chat or downloaded a handout)

30

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WEBINARS ARE REPEATABLE

Like your other marketing campaigns, you’ll build a repeatable process that can be used consistently. Once you’ve created one webinar and branded it the way you like, think about making this a template for future programs.

This way, it eliminates the need to start from scratch and you can personalize based on the topic.

Marketing webinars tend to involve speaker identification, pre-promotion, registration, live broadcast and post-webinar follow up.

Once you define and document the process, webinars become part of a repeatable machineto fuel demand and grow your pipeline.

WEBINARS ARE REUSABLE

Marketers can look to webinars as a “Swiss Army knife” of content creation.

Consider that:

• Slides can be posted to SlideShare, turned into an Adobe Spark page or an infographic

• Video can be broken up into bite-sized chunks and used on blogs and across social media to drive traffic to the gated, on-demand version or a future program

• Audio from the webinar can be turned into a podcast that you can host on your website

• The presentation can be turned into a series of owned blog postings or blogs managed by your partners

• And of course, the webinar itself can be used to drive incremental leads via prospects that register to view the on-demand archive

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THE FUNDAMENTALS: BE USEFUL

In the past, the goal of marketers was to be relevant to their target audience. Today, marketers must move up the value chain from providing relevance to providing usefulness.

To be useful, webinars need to do one of two things:

1. Address a business need

2. Teach viewers how to solve a problem

Whether it’s webinars, white papers, website content or blog postings, your content should provide one (or both) of these. As such, don’t pitch your company’s product unless you’re demonstrating to prospects how it addresses their needs or how it solves their problems.

If your product does address both, be sure to focus on the solution (how) rather than your product (what).

BE ENGAGING

Sales prospects attended (or viewed) your webinar for a reason. They could have easily downloaded a white paper or visited your website instead.

But they took the time to join your webinar.

Therefore, be sure to provide a captivating and engaging experience by showing enthusiasm, using eye-catching visuals and varying the media often—that means incorporating audience engagement throughout your presentation, including multiple speakers, video, polls, Q&A, screen sharing and chat.

Try and get your audience to contribute to the discussion instead of just presenting to them.

HOW TO USE WEBINARS TO CREATE DEMAND

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88% of webcastsinclude Q&A.

BE INTERACTIVE

Video webcasts provide a tremendous opportunity for marketers—a real-time connection between your organization and your sales prospects.

A one-way broadcast is a failure to capitalize on this opportunity. Rather than involving your prospects, a one-way broadcast forces them to sit idly on their hands while attempting to remain engaged.

Interactive webinars provide a more enjoyable user experience while creating far more touch points between you and your prospects.

Which would you rather have: an idle and bored audience or one that’s actively engaged with you and your brand?

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DID YOU KNOW?

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74 percent of attendees respond to polls in live webcasts.

This powerful tool provides immediate feedback when presenting live.

Kick off a presentation with an icebreaker poll or suggest a few topic areas for your audience to vote on. Polling lets you learn more about your audience and their interests.

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR SALES PIPELINE VIA WEBINAR-BASED LEAD QUALIFICATIONThis paper has referenced interactivity multiple times. The use of interactive features in webinars is critical in creating enjoyable experiences, sustaining demand (i.e. interest) and driving the lead qualification process.

INTERACTION GENERATES VALUABLE PROSPECT DATA

It’s our belief that interaction has replaced consumption. The use of real-time engagement tools (e.g. interactive polls, Q&A, group chat, etc.) creates an experience that engages prospects.

To date, web analytics (i.e. for your corporate website) have focused on static measures, such as page views, bounce rate, time on site and pages per session.

With interactive webinars, we’ve again moved up the value chain. Now, we can analyze answers to polling questions, percent of program viewed, questions submitted to the presenter and chat messages contributed to the conversation.

With web analytics, you decipher what they consumed.

With a video-based online platform, you know what participants consumed—but more importantly—you also know what they said and how they feel.

As a marketer, this information is key in understanding your audience’s interests and what they find valuable.

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INTERACTION AS AN INPUT TO LEAD QUALIFICATION

From the increased level of interaction, think about the wealth of engagement data that we can now feed into our CRM and marketing automation systems. Marketing automation systems exist to process, analyze and respond to these data sets.

Armed with this additional data, you’re now able to segment your prospects effectively. You can configure lead scoring formulas in your marketing automation system that map to interaction points within the webinar (e.g. time viewed, questions asked and chat messages submitted).

Typical audience segments that marketers create for a webinar follow up are registered vs. attended lists.

Based on this lead scoring, your sales team can prioritize their follow up with the most-engaged prospects, while the less-engaged prospects can be placed into a lead nurturing program.

Include engagement data in your lead scoring formula.

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TIPS AND CONSIDERATIONS FOR YOUR WEBINARSFIND EASY WAYS TO INCORPORATE VIDEO

While it’s fine to broadcast out of your corporate studios (if you have one), it doesn’t need to be fancy. Instead, look to use common tools you may already have access to, such as a webcam and your built-in computer microphone.

In addition to speaking on webcam, look to integrate rich media into your slide content—including pre-recorded video and screen sharing to stay dynamic.

This can create monetization opportunities to offer sponsorships with your webinars, including speaking slots, video commercials, branding, lead packages and more.

SHORT AND SWEET

90-minute webinars are dinosaurs—they’re extinct.

While there may be a rare occasion to host a webinar of that length, shorter is always better. A good sweet spot is 30 to 40 minutes of content and five to 10 minutes of Q&A.

Audience members may begin to tune out five to 10 minutes into the program, which provides you with an increasing challenge the longer your program airs.

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DID YOU KNOW?

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The average view time of a live webcast is 44 minutes.

If you think your live webcast will run longer than this, consider breaking up your content into a webcast series to extend the life of your marketing efforts and fill your editorial calendar.

ENSURE YOU CAN BE SEEN ON MOBILE DEVICES

96 percent of people use a smartphone to get things done.

Your audience is on mobile. Be sure that your online presentations are mobile friendly and ensure that the rich engagement features (mentioned earlier) can be experienced on mobile as well.

If mobile users cannot interact, then your mobile-based video experience degrades from two-way interaction to one-way viewing.

Picture-in-picture video and slide formats allow for a seamless viewing experience, so your audience does not have to toggle between slides and video on their mobile devices.

PLAN AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR AROUND CONSISTENT COMMUNICATIONS

To keep your sales pipeline filled on a consistent basis, be sure you’re producing content regularly and continuing to nurture your webinar leads between programs.

This doesn’t have to be every day or every other day—but it should be consistent enough that prospects are keeping you top of mind and finding a rich library of on-demand video content.

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Digital Media Solutions

West Digital Media Solutions provides tools, technology and intelligence to help companies target the right audiences, reach across multiple channels and monitor the impact of their messages.

Designed for PR, IR, marketing and corporate communications professionals, our solutions enable mission-critical communications that engage media, investors, customers and employees.

• Press release distribution

• Media and influencer targeting

• Webcasting and streaming

• Media monitoring

• Online newsrooms

Learn more at west.com/digital-media-solutions/

Follow us @WestCorpDC

Contact us Marketing_DMS@west.com

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